Wee Ninja - Part 8

With only four things left to make for project Wee Ninja we have officially reached the point on most projects where I begin to loose interest. That's one of my problems: I'm great at ideas and starting things - I'm bad at finishing. It's mostly just a personality thing. By the time I get to the point where the finish line is on the horizon I'm already thinking about what's next.

I've learned to overcome this and finish things all the way but there's a point when a project becomes more work than fun. I'm there now with Project Wee Ninja. There is however a major motivating factor I don't have with most of my projects: a smiling three year old at the end. As such, I'll soldier on.

I didn't really get a whole lot done over the past two days. That's a direct factor of me being overly busy at work. I did get the boots finished though, so that's one of four things down.

I went to Target when they opened the other morning and began spelunking through the childrens shoe isle. Good god, it's like people are purposely trying to hide the perfect pair of $20 sneakers or something. I didn't find anything remotely close to what I needed in the boys section, but the blight on humanity that are Uggs Boots have the fortunate benefit of the copy-cat effect. I found what I needed in the girls section:



Yes, these are ugly. Yes, they have flowers and crap on them. I have an exacto knife and paint. Let the carnage begin.

First off, I removed the flowers then tapped up and sprayed the sides of the soles. Duplicolor Vinyl and Fabric paint is good stuff for something like this because it'll stick to just about any type of plastic:



What you can also see in that picture is a bottle of suede dye I picked up literally about 15 years ago. This is why you don't throw out leather care products unless they're totally wasted - they're typically still usable well after you've forgotten about them. I proceeded to apply liberal amounts of the dye to the suede. It worked out ok, but there was still the issue of the outline of the flowers I had cut off.

I could have solved this problem in a number of ways but I went with something straight forward and decorative. I first measured out a couple of shapes, cut them up along with mirror images, and then glued them to the boots.



They still didn't have the color I wanted even after the dying so I hit them with a light coat of the Krylon Camo paint. The results are pretty decent:





They actually look better in person than they do in the photos. Next up I'm going to work on the mask and sash but that can wait till tomorrow when I'm (hopefully) not as tired from work.

More to come!